of the average _debutante_. "You
feel so kind o' sheepish when you're barefooted and your dress is all
slimpsy."

Poor Melissa! how could she know that yesterday, in all the limp
forlornness that had made her hang her head when Sterling spoke to her,
she had been a part of the beauty of the canon, while to-day, in all her
pink and rigid glory, she was a garish spot of discordant color in the
landscape? How, indeed, do any of us know that we are not at our worst
in our most triumphant moments?

The camp was well-nigh deserted, that morning. Poindexter had gone to
Santa Elena to consult his employer, and most of the workmen had
preferred the convivial joys of the Mexican saloon at San Gabriel to the
stillness of the canon. Sterling had written a few letters after
breakfast, and then, taking his rifle from the rack, sauntered along the
little path that led from the camp to the tunnel. The Chinese cook was
dexterously slipping the feathers from a clammy fowl at the door of the
kitchen tent.

"Hello, John," the young man called cheerfully. "What for you cook
chicken? I go catchee venison for dinner."

The Chinaman smiled indulgently. Evidently the deer hunts of the past
had not been brilliantly successful.

"I fly one lit' chicken," he said composedly. "He no velly big. By 'm by
you bling labbit, I fly him too."

"Rabbit!" laughed back the hunter contemptuously, breaking his rifle and
peering into the breech to see that it was loaded. "I'll not waste a
cartridge on a rabbit, John."

He lapsed from pigeon English with an ease that betokened a newcomer.
The Chinaman looked after him pensively.

"Mist' Stellin' heap velly nice man," he said, with gentle
condescension; "all same he _no sabe_ shoot. By 'm by he come home, he
heap likee my little flied looster."

He held his "little rooster" rigidly erect by its elongated legs, and
patiently picked the pin-feathers from its back. He had finished this
process, and, suspending it by one wing in an attitude of patient
suffering, was singeing it with a blazing paper, when Melissa appeared.

"What you want, gell?" he demanded autocratically, noticing that she
carried no pail.

"Where is the young man,--the tall one?" asked Melissa.

"Young man? Mist' Stellin'? He take 'im gun an' go catchee labbit."

He waved his torch in the direction of the path, and then dropped it on
the ground and stamped it out with his queerly shod foot.

Melissa hesitated a moment. She could n